The bungled ending

I've recently read two SF books that were great adventures with interesting main characters.  Both were, in essence, quest stories, with the characters having to get to a certain place to do something before someone evil stopped them.  And in my opinion, both stories had failed endings. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like the main character I've spent a whole book getting to know and like suddenly ceasing to exist.

In both stories the main characters were swallowed up by a larger consciousness and ceased to exist in their original forms.  One was a biological character, the second an android, but in both cases they were spit out as something different. Both were facing impossible odds at the time of their transformation.

To me this stinks of deus ex machina, rescuing the characters from their problems by teaming them up with a more powerful, more intelligent being.  And I think it's cheating to get to the end of a book and suddenly see superpowers given to somebody who's been failing to solve their problems for 300 pages.

In contrast, I've recently read Stephanie Salter's Gemsigns.  The book is brilliant, on many levels.  It explores the consequences of having genetically modified humans, "gems" living alongside "norms".  Stephanie brilliantly charts the tensions, factions, religious fundamentalism, and broad range of prejudices that arise.  The character interactions feel true, if frightening at times.

At the end of the story a charismatic gem saves a child by using her particular talent - "gemsign".  This talent has been hidden from the reader throughout the story very successfully.  Stephanie sets up the final confrontation skilfully, as part of a series of events of violence to gems.  The heroine is forced to reveal her hidden talent in the face of the world's media.  

I haven't yet read the second book, but can already guess at some of the issues and resonances that will be set off by this character revealing her talent.  And that's the function of a good ending, to leave us wanting more.  Yes, we need to round off that particular story arc, but we also need to make the reader feel it's worth reading book two.  

These days publishers will be looking for a series and an ongoing story arc when we submit the first book, and getting the ending of the first book right is key.  If we bungle it, we turn readers off the rest of the series. So many books seem to fail this test, including, in my opinion, one of this year's Hugo nominees.  Too quick a resolution of the book's quest had me thinking is that it?  And I was surprised to see there was going to be a book two, because the whole story seemed to have been wrapped up at the end of the first book.  

Writing SF does not absolve us from the task of being master storytellers, or from the challenge of producing appropriate and satisfying endings for our tales.